This question brings to mind an experience I had early in my ministry. In fact, I’d only been ordained a few months and was teaching at a college. One church had a minister who was much loved by his congregation; …Read More

My biggest concern is the way in which the postmodern mentality is seducing the church, even the Reformed church. There seems to be a tacit assumption that somewhere around 1970, at the end of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, …Read More

A lot of the debate over divorce has to do with the way we interpret and handle Jesus’ teaching on the subject. In Matthew’s Gospel, for example, the Pharisees come to Jesus for a decision and they are trying to …Read More

Perhaps the most unique characteristic of the Christian God is that he exists. The other ones don’t. Of course, that is a matter of profound debate, as we all know. I would say the chief and most critical differences have …Read More

Last year I addressed eight hundred physicians at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. I was asked to address that precise question: How you decide when to pull the plug? I was also interested to note that the largest single …Read More

There’s only one absolute way I know of to keep your Christian growth from becoming stagnant, and that is to die. The only time Christian growth stops altogether is at death. That’s because we don’t need to grow any further; …Read More

I’m not sure I can explain the so-called Kübler-Ross phenomenon. There’s been a significant amount of research on this. I’ve heard reports saying that as many as 50 percent of those who have suffered clinical death and have been resuscitated …Read More

From one perspective our good deeds have absolutely nothing to do with our salvation; from another perspective they have everything to do with it. This is the core debate that has been raging among Christians ever since the Protestant Reformation. …Read More

We are all aware of hellfire-and-damnation preachers who rave and scream about the decadence of the world. It can become tiresome to listen to all of that. I think we all respect people who can disagree with others in a …Read More

The short answer to that, emphatically and definitely, is yes. Not only is God concerned about the material well-being of Christians, he’s deeply and profoundly concerned for the material well-being of the whole world. God created a material world. He …Read More

The idea that there’s some intrinsic or inherent power in the blood of Jesus is a popular concept in the Christian world. It even crops up from time to time in various hymns and praise songs. This idea reflects a …Read More

There’s a great controversy within the Christian church about that question. Some people take the position that under no circumstances should a Christian encumber himself in financial indebtedness, quoting such passages as “Owe no one anything except to love one …Read More

There is no single view of evolution out there. We make one distinction, for example, between macroevolution and microevolution. Macroevolution claims that all of life evolved fortuitously from a single cell—one little pulsating cell of life made up of amino …Read More

The real question here is, Is everything that is set forth in Scripture to be applied to all people of all time and of all cultures? I don’t know any biblical scholar who would argue that everything set forth in …Read More

I think the New Testament does teach that the whole world is born into the consequences of a fallen nature because of the sin of Adam and Eve. The New Testament repeats this idea frequently—“that through the disobedience of one …Read More